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Book Review

The celebrated New Left historian and political essayist Perry Anderson's latest book The Indian Ideology
(2012) appears at a time when several mainstream publishers with their
assorted wares are proclaiming India 's arrival on the stage of world
history. Many of these are truncated histories of the so-called arrival
which, interestingly, do not go back beyond the 1990s. The self-defined
limits are convenient as they sustain faith in the Indian ‘miracle'.
Anderson , however, digs farther back, beginning with the country's
anti-colonial struggle under Gandhi's leadership. His objective is to
force into light the historical unconscious of the Indian polity. In the
process, he offers quite a few rational, historical explanations of
several ‘miracles', including those of India 's unity as a country and
its stability as a democracy. Anderson 's narrative is gripping,
suitably spiced here and there, and supported by adequate notes and
references that any serious work of history needs. He hammers away
delicately but firmly at the gods of modern Indian historiography to
undermine the “pieties” (5) that have kept truth a prisoner of darkness
for too long now.

Invoking Marx and Engels's German Ideology ,
Anderson 's book sets out to test the ‘idea of India ' against the
reality. That ‘idea', comprising primarily the triune of democracy,
secularity and unity, constitutes, according to him, the ideology of the
Indian republic. Significantly, the historian in Anderson departs from
his acknowledged ‘German' intellectual predecessors in more clearly
articulating ideology as grounded in history – in “the conditions and
events that generated them” (2). Yet that does not mean he would deny
the crucial agency of political leadership. On the contrary, he
sometimes appears, to me at least, to be conceding too much power –
among ideology, event and agency – to personal agency as the producer
and director of history.

The book is based on three essays published in the summer of 2012 in the London Review of Books
and is part of Anderson 's forthcoming work on the inter-state system
of US, China , Russia , India and Brazil . The case of India , he says,
required greater treatment of historical background; hence this book.

Anderson comes out as a fiercely polemical historian
who nevertheless does not go overboard in bolstering his thesis. His
central argument is that the Indian state continues to bask in the
memorial glow of the anti-colonial struggle, and this clouds its vision
of the reality which is at serious odds with its ideology. In his
opinion, neither democracy, nor secularity, nor indeed unity can be said
to have been accomplished as projects. While there is a fair degree of
tolerance of criticism of the country's track record as a democracy, the
tolerance decreases when it comes to secularity, and disappears
altogether when it comes to unity.

As a continuation of the nationalist movement, the
Indian democracy excludes, practically, vast sections of the people.
Indeed, both the Partition and the Constitution were imposed from above,
Anderson remarks. Historically, he says, the Congress has been
“controlled by a coalition of rich farmers, traders and urban
professionals” (110). If the resulting exclusion of such large numbers
of people has not translated into electoral retribution, the reasons lie
in the linguistic diversity of India and in the entrenched divisive
system of caste. The role of caste in the country's political system has
of course changed over the years since independence, yet “[w]hat would
not change [is] its structural significance as the ultimate secret of
Indian democracy” (112). Catching that significance in a flash of
insight, Anderson recalls Ambedkar's “inaugural error” which inhered in
his perception of “a contradiction between society and polity” –
according to which the “imperfections” in the polity are the “effects of
distortion” in the society. In a formulation that will probably go down
as one of his most incisive, he goes on to say:

But the relationship between the two has always
been more paradoxical than this. A rigid social hierarchy was the basis
of original democratic stability, and its mutation into a
compartmentalized identity politics has simultaneously deepened
parliamentary democracy and debauched it. (171)

He likewise questions the Indian state for the
self-congratulatory noises it makes over secularism: “Indian secularism
is Hindu confessionalism by another name” (142). He acknowledges,
though, that the state is more secular than the society (145). Going
back, he squarely holds Gandhi's infusion of a Hindu imaginary into the
nationalist discourse as the founding moment of the Indian state's
persistent ambivalence over secularism. In fact, the roots of the
Partition which took place on religious lines can be traced to the
Non-Cooperation Movement which transformed the Congress from an elite
organization into a mass organization. But would the course of things
have been any different if Gandhi had not emerged on the scene? Probably
not, he says. Religion had already entered the nationalist discourse,
as in Maharashtra and elsewhere. However, there was a chance that the
situation would change once leadership passed on to Nehru who had strong
socialist and rationalist leanings. But Nehru, Anderson rues, not only
chose to succumb to Gandhi's whimsical reliance on popular religious
discourse but himself flirted with Hinduism in pursuit of his ambitious
vision of a centralized political authority after independence. Yet this
might have been unavoidable, Anderson seems to suggest, given the
reality of India 's political culture. Hence, his semi-exonerating
verdict on the Congress: “Structurally, the secularism of Congress had
been a matter not of hypocrisy, but of bad faith, which is not the
same…” (139).

Turning to the fond myth that India 's preservation
of its unity is a rare feat, he emphatically points out that most of the
former European colonies have since retained their borders. While
‘threat to the unity and integrity of India' remains a favourite slogan
of political parties during elections and while no one wants – including
the leading intellectuals – to probe the reality of India's ‘unity',
Anderson remarks that the extremely heavy presence of the security
forces in Kashmir and the north east indicates a precarious unity,
achieved and maintained with great difficulty.

His prescription is that if India is to forge ahead,
it must come to terms with the ghosts of its past. It must candidly
re-examine its founding ideology and test it against the touchstone of
reality. For instance, India can resolve its disputes with China and
Pakistan only if it embraces political realism, something that the
leadership learnt from Nehru to shun.

While Anderson is quite hard on Gandhi and Nehru for
part of their political legacy, he generously admires them for other
reasons. The former's organizational abilities and iron will and the
latter's commitment to democracy particularly earn his praise, although
Nehru's gift of his dynasty has been as bad a curse as the skewed voting
system of the first-past-the-post bequeathed by the Raj. Anderson has
particularly high regard for Subhas Chandra Bose's secularism and B. R.
Ambedkar's intellectual acumen.

The well-paced historical narrative would have been
richer and weightier if Anderson had treated of the Indian Left's fate
and role as well, which he has chosen to keep out except for some
passing observations. One of these is: “. . . the marginalization of the
Left has been a structural effect of the dominance of the hegemonic
religion in the national identity” (148). But that does not explain the
Left's relative decline in India over the years, nor does it tell us why
the Left – of all the political stakeholders – should possess
effectively no agency to shape history. This sounds awkward in a work
that seems to grant, as I said above, an excess of agency to even some
individuals, such as Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah and Mountbatten.

There are places, particularly in the third
chapter/essay, where Anderson relies on one or two sources, giving the
impression of having selected the sources to suit the narrative. Even if
these are essays, these are nevertheless essays on history, not some
“loose sallies of the mind,” as Samuel Johnson conceived the essay to
be. Although Anderson does not often attenuate the historian's rigour
for the powers of polemical rhetoric, yet he sometimes does resign to
the temptation. Had he extended the range of his sources and included
other points of view, it would have certainly enriched his book.

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kriti+culture

kriti, with roots in Sanskrit,is art, artifice, creation, work, labor . . . the inscription of the arts in criticism,of labor in the arts, of art in labor. In Punjabi, it incarnates itself also as kirti culture, the worker's culture.

kriticulture - with its dissident 'k' - is the interspace of criti(cal)culture that cloudlike travels across, overwhelms borders . . . the insemination of creative criticism, and of critical creativity, in culture.